I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Addicted?

My wife is an addictions counsellor with a strong background in psychology. It's amazed me the sorts of things that people can become addicted to and I won't go into them here! However, she's always said that the first step to addressing any addiction is for the addict to admit it. Now according to her I am addicted to work (her definition of work includes anything that involves a computer, including books and papers, so it's quite broad). I have to admit that I do spend an inordinate amount of time doing things that fall into that definition; even when I'm watching TV I'll usually have a book or laptop on my knee (now it's often my iPad). But I'm not sure I'd say I was an addict. And even if I am, I'm not sure I'd want to be "cured". I think a lot of my friends and colleagues would also fall into that category. But then that last statement does apply to many other forms of addiction. Hmmmm.